


The Night Shift

by MageOfAcademia



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Anxiety, Gen, Halloween, Hospitals, Medical School, Panic Attack, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 10:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20795216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MageOfAcademia/pseuds/MageOfAcademia
Summary: Ten years later, Michael Mell’s life has changed in ways he never could have predicted.Halloween still makes him uneasy, though.





	The Night Shift

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this work is set in a hospital and there is a description of a panic attack. There are no graphic descriptions of any injuries or medical procedures.

In the spirit of Halloween someone left a box of stickers at the charge nurse’s desk, and nearly everyone now sports at least a jack-o-lantern or a ghost on their scrubs. Michael picks a ghost with headphones. It stands out, blinding white against the royal blue of his scrub shirt. 

He sits at an empty workstation, pausing to chug a can of Diet Coke and wolf down a protein bar. Ten p.m. on Halloween night and predictably the emergency department has been completely swamped, so four hours into his shift and long after the cafeteria has closed, he needs to eat something to stay on his feet. It’s still early enough in his third year of medical school that clinical rotations feel foreign, and he has only been in the emergency department for a couple of shifts. 

It’s weird enough that he’s made it this far. He was pretty dysfunctional as a high school student, and even during freshman year of college he still didn’t feel like anything about his life fit him properly. And then he realized he loved biology, he was good at coding and statistics, he could even tolerate chemistry and physics, and before he knew it he had a job in bioinformatics, an actual adult apartment, and a dog. And now, six years later, he’s a medical student, and functioning as a real adult helping to take care of real patients, and it feels so far removed from his teenage self that he can barely believe he’s the same person. 

Even being awake at night feels different these days. He remembers back in high school when, in a haze of weed, video games, and insomnia, he’d stay up texting Jeremy until an ungodly hour of the morning, and then groggily drag himself to school the next day. Now, he goes home after work, eats something, does a handful of practice questions for the exam, and normally passes out before he manages to even think about video games. On night shifts he does the same thing, eating breakfast and then usually going straight to sleep. It’s nothing like working a 8-5 job, it’s far from his experience in college, it’s a completely different world than high school, it’s just different than anything he has ever done. 

To make it even weirder, he couldn’t sleep well last night and now he’s functioning on caffeine and snack bars again. And he hasn’t liked Halloween in years... he suspects that accounts for his mood somewhat. Something always triggers his anxiety, making all those old insecurities from his teenage years rise right back up. Tonight makes him feel a twinge in his gut, as if something, anything, is bound to go wrong. 

He envies the ghost sticker its headphones. The emergency department beeps and buzzes with a million stimuli, and right now it all feels like more than he can deal with. He’d put on his headphones if he could, immerse himself in some reggae and escape.

Right now he could use a nap. Not going to get one until he leaves, though. 

His resident taps him on the shoulder. She’s a tiny person whose scrubs puddle around her ankles, and yet she still carries this ridiculous amount of confidence when she speaks, more confidence than he imagines he’ll ever have. At least she’s nice and doesn’t belittle him for being a fish out of water on this rotation. “You still awake, dude?” 

He nods, grimacing as he forces himself into a more alert state. 

“Want to see the new patient? Eighteen year old, came here from a party, feeling like he can’t breathe. Room 20. He looks pretty stable to me but I think he’s a good one for you to see.” 

He nods again. “Yeah, I can do that. Should I find you or Dr. Watts when I’m done?” 

“Find me, but come get me right away if you think it’s anything complicated. I’ll be in 16 doing an ultrasound.” She bustles off, immediately dragged into another conversation with a concerned nurse. 

He skims the patient’s chart - an otherwise healthy kid, who’s only come to the hospital once before for a broken arm. Nothing to worry about here. 

He does not miss the irony in his chart review. He himself was an average kid, an otherwise healthy kid, at that age, with mild asthma that had led to maybe a handful of overnight trips to the emergency room as a youngster. Took years before someone picked up on the anxiety, the barely hidden panic attacks. 

He wonders if the kid in bed 20 came in for a panic attack, and if anyone had ever noticed and told him to get help before it got this bad. 

He needs to stop transferring his own problems onto patients.

The kid in question is disheveled and tearful - dark, damp hair that appears to have been dunked in a sink within the last thirty minutes or so, normally tan skin that now looks unnaturally pale, the remnants of some blue or green hair product smeared around his temples. He clutches the thin hospital blanket to his chest. He answers questions in a shaky voice. 

His name is Eli, he’s eighteen years old and a high school senior, he was at a Halloween party, and then everything went to hell and now he’s here. 

Michael’s palms start to sweat. One hand grips his pen even tighter, and he sits on the other one so as not to fidget. He plants his feet on the floor and takes a deep breath, willing himself to focus on the frightened boy in front of him. 

The boy’s pupils are dilated and he stammers as he speaks, but eventually the story spills out. “I think I’m having a panic attack,” he whispers. “And it won’t go away. Maybe it’s the weed, or the drinks I had, but it won’t go away and I haven’t had one this bad since freshman year.” 

Michael presses, gently, for context. 

“We... we were at a party at Nikki’s house, she’s probably the coolest girl in our year and so everyone went. And I didn’t want to be there, I only went because Zach said he needed a wingman if he was going to get with Nikki, but I don’t like parties anyway, and then he ditched me to go hang with these other dudes and try to impress her, and I wanted to leave, but it was so loud and dark and I felt really weird from the weed and the weird punch stuff they were serving, and I kinda started freaking out.” 

The boy draws in a long, shuddering breath before continuing. “And so I went outside, but I didn’t get very far because I couldn’t breathe and my legs felt weird and I thought I was going to pass out or die or something, and then I think I sat down on the sidewalk, and then I guess someone called 911? But it hasn’t gotten all the way better yet and I just want to make it stop, and I still feel like I’m going to die, and I’m just freaking out, and I wish Zach was here with me because he’s chill and he always cheers me up, but he’s trying to get the girl and I’d be a horrible person if I texted him and then ruined the mood, and he ditched me because I was ruining it anyway just by being there, and I screwed it all up, and now everyone’s going to know how big a loser I am that I can’t even stay at a party...”

He trails off, still shaking. 

Michael, too, feels like he might be shaking, almost imperceptibly vibrating. He was this kid once, years ago now, but while the boy is talking it all feels so real, as if it were yesterday. It’s drawing him in, and he swallows hard, trying to keep his stomach and his brain in check. He is not the kid, this kid is someone else, this kid is a patient and therefore Michael needs to keep things professional. 

But man, if someone had been there for him in this moment years ago, Michael maybe wouldn’t have gone through the hell that the next year had been, trying to recover. 

And he desperately wants to be that someone for this boy, reassure him that right now he’s safe, and that things are going to get better. He can’t say exactly that, and it dawns on him that he doesn’t know if it’ll get better. He and Jeremy became friends again, after all. Never exactly the same as before, but still best friends, and it was all okay. But it was never the same. And he doesn’t know if life will get any easier for the boy huddled in front of him. But he wants to let this kid know that it’s possible, that things can get better, that right now things suck but someday they might not suck quite as badly. 

Michael draws in a deep breath himself. Deep, steady breaths, showing the kid sitting across from him that it’s safe to breathe deeply in this room. 

“Thank you for telling me what happened,” he says, measuring his words out carefully. “That’s a hard situation to be in, and feeling like that can be really scary. I’m glad you’re here now, so that we can help you.” 

It’s clumsy, and he knows it’ll take years before those words flow naturally. But it’s a start. 

The kid looks up, and maintains eye contact with him. His breathing has slowed down, matching the cadence of Michael’s breathing. “Yeah,” the kid mutters, “it sucks.” 

Michael nods, takes another deep breath, and launches into the questions he knows he has to ask. And it feels easier right now than it has with other patients. 

And for the first Halloween in about ten years, Michael feels like he might be on the right path after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, readers, for your time. 
> 
> Ten years after a story has ended, no character will stay the same. I do not classify this as an AU for that reason - we all undergo significant life changes between our teens and our mid-twenties, and Michael is no less susceptible to those changes than we are. There are many paths that we take after we leave high school, and sometimes those paths are incredibly hard to predict. 
> 
> To those who strongly identify with Jeremy, Michael, or the other BMC characters as they are written in the original work or in fanfiction set in high school: you too will change with time, and those of us who feel like losers/geeks/whatever during adolescence have such a wide range of things that we can become. Sometimes finding the right path means you end up exploring a world you never dreamed you’d get to experience. It might even feel out of character for you at first, but soon you’ll realize that like any good character in fiction, you too get a chance to evolve, change, and experience some character development.
> 
> The other characters in this work are purely my own creation. Any resemblance they bear to characters in other works of fiction is purely coincidence. 
> 
> With love, admiration, and encouragement,   
— MageOfAcademia


End file.
